The only confirmed population is a tiny population of only 10-15 foxes in and around Lassen National Park where the Northern Sierra meets the Southern Cascades.
This area has historically seen more sightings than any other part of California (sighting map for Northern California). This concentration is focused in Lassen, Tehama and Shasta Counties in and around Lassen Park. There have also been a few sightings in Modoc, Siskiyou and Trinity Counties.
The existence of the Sierra Nevada red fox has recently been confirmed by a team led by John Perrine of UC Berkeley. The team has located a small population of 10-15 Sierra Nevada red foxes existing in and around Lassen National Park in the Cascades Range. A later study proved that these were Sierra Nevada Red Foxes and not Eastern Red Foxes, which are abundant at the lower elevations in California.
A good description of the Lassen study, along with several rare photos of the foxes, can be found here. In the Sierras, the Sierra Nevada red fox was typically found at about 9,000 feet, with one record at 4,000, another at 5,500 and another at 7,000 feet. In the Cascades, they are usually found at around 6,000 feet, dropping down to 4,000 feet in the winter and moving up to 8,000 feet in the summer.
A report by the DFG in 1987 said the Sierra Nevada red fox was endangered, but noted that sightings continue in the rest of the Sierra Nevada outside the Cascades within the traditional range of the species. I believe that they probably still exist in the Sierras. I am aware of some recent sightings on the East side near Mammoth Mountain at high elevations.
They reportedly still exist in Mineral King south of Sequoia National Park.
I am also aware of sightings of the Sierra Nevada Red Fox in the past 30 years on the Sierra National Forest. In 1971, a Sierra Nevada red fox was sighted at Florence Lake at about 9,000 feet. In 1973, there was a sighting at Soda Springs near Mammoth Pool Reservoir at 4,500 feet.
In 1987, there was a sighting along Highway 168 between Auberry and Shaver Lake at about 4,300 feet, a very low elevation. In 1991, there was a sighting at Papoose Lake north of Lake Edison at about 10,390 feet.
There have also been a few sightings in Yosemite Valley in the past decade or so.
On the Stanislaus, there have been a number of sightings in the area of the Emigrant Wilderness, in particular something called the Waterhouse Wilderness Study Area on the northwest edge of the Emigrant Wilderness.
In Mono County, Sierra Nevada red foxes have been reported from Bridgeport Valley.
In Nevada County near Lake Tahoe, there is a sighting from 1994 along Highway 89 north of Truckee.
This cool paper by C. Hart Merriam shows that Sierra Nevada Red Foxes were formerly common at high elevations in the Mount Shasta area, and that tracks were seen almost every day (!) but they were very wary and never entered the traps that they had set. It is interesting that fishers were also present in this area. V. v. necator is probably very rare to absent in the Shasta area now.
This report makes one wonder just what it is that has driven V.v. necator to near-extinction. I strongly suspect grazing.
One of the best historical sources on the Sierra Nevada Red Fox is this chapter from Joseph Grinnell's hard-to-find Furbearers of California from 1937. Since continued attempts to open the file in a browser with Opera and Firefox kept crashing my system, I finally opened it online with Internet Explorer and was able to save it to my drive.
I'm making it available on this site for download so you can view it in Adobe Reader without crashing your browser. It was even hard to upload the file, so there is something wrong with it, but you should be able to view it ok. One thing it makes clear is that the Sierra Nevada red fox was much more common in the first four decades of the century than it is now.
It has declined drastically and desperately needs Endangered Species listing. If you want to risk crashing your browser, you can try it with Internet Explorer here.
At the time of Grinnell's writing, this fox was preying heavily on Sierra Nevada Snowshoe Hares and White-Tailed Hares, both of which are now pretty rare in the Sierras. I wonder if that is related to their decline? The decline of the white-tailed hare in the Sierra, formerly common on the East Side, is related exclusively to grazing.
All high-elevation needs to be banned from the Sierra anyway, as it is simply a catastrophe. Cows do not belong in high elevation meadows, and there is no place for them up there. We can start by getting rid of grazing in wilderness areas. Allowing grazing in wilderness areas was the only way that the Wilderness Act of 1964 could be passed.
I am not impressed at all with the ability of the US Forest Service to preserve wildlife in general, not to mention sensitive or endangered species. I spent years monitoring the Sierra National Forest and the workers I met with were some of the most corrupt and dishonest people I have ever dealt with.
The entire mentality was devoted to resource extraction, and even wildlife biologists, botanists and fisheries specialists routinely issued "no significant harm" on virtually every single Environmental Assessment Report I ever saw.
Even less impressive is the California Department of Fish and Game, though at least their heads are in the right direction. Individuals working with the DFG are good people, but the Commission is run by political clowns.
There are all sorts of species that need to be listed as threatened or endangered, but the DFG has hardly made even one such listing in the last decade. The DFG has been routinely denying petitions to list any species at all as threatened or endangered for a decade or so now.
Further, there are questions about how much a CA T & E designation even helps a species, as the DFG seldom intervenes in any way to help even the species they have listed as T & E.
In the early 1990's, the CA DFG produced some excellent volumes - Reptiles and Amphibians of Special Concern in California by Mark Jennings, Fish of Special Concern in California by Peter Moyne and Threatened and Endangered Species of California.
The reports by Jennings and Moyne listed numerous species that should be listed as species of special concern, threatened or endangered. To my knowledge, 15 years later, not a single one of these has been listed. A prime example is that the Sierra Nevada Red Fox, which the DFG even admitted in 2004 was critically endangered, is still listed as "threatened" instead of "endangered".
Even a petition to uplist it will surely be denied. The game here has been to devastate the DFG with budget cuts, even during times when the state is flush with cash. Then the DFG gets to say that they don't have any money to list any new species. Cool game, huh?
It seems every year, the DFG gets hammered with new budget cuts, and in lush years, the money never gets reinstated. Any environmentalist who is a fiscal conservative needs to have their head examined.
The FS complains of budget cuts too, but in contrast they are actively hostile to the environment. Their whole agenda was to let grazing and logging go on to the greatest extent possible and to deny all negative impacts on the environment of such.
Go into a local FS office and the whole place, even the wildlife biologists, are avidly listening to Rush Limbaugh! Most of them, including once again wildlife biologists who supposedly believe in evolution, are members of fundamentalist churches! Go figure.
Such is the state of things in the supposedly pro-environment US. Large majorities support the environmentalist agenda, but of course the Republicans and incredibly even the Clintonista triangulating Democrats are both very hostile to the environment. There is no logical reason for either party, especially the Democrats, to take this stance.
The only explanation is that both parties are completely dedicated to the corporate and pro-business agenda, and the entire rest of the population, even if that means 55-98% of the population depending on the issue, can just go to Hell.
Click the wolverines label at the end of the post to see other posts on wolverines in the US, including many sighting reports and photos.
References
- CDFG. 1987. Sierra Nevada Red Fox: Five-year Status Report. California Department of Fish and Game, Sacramento, California, USA.
Grinnell, Joseph. 1924. Animal Life in the Yosemite. Berkeley: University of California Press, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
Kucera, T. E. 1995. Recent Photograph of a Sierra Nevada Red Fox. California Fish and Game 81:43-44.
Merriam, Clinton Hart. 1899. Results of a Biological Survey of Mount Shasta, California. Washington D.C.: U. S. Department of Agriculture, Division of Biological Survey.
Perrine, J. D., J. P. Pollinger, B. N. Sacks, R. H. Barrett, and R. K. Wayne. 2007. Genetic Evidence For the Persistence of the Critically Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox in Northern California. Conservation Genetics 8:1083-1095.
Southern California Edison Company. 2001. Final Technical Study Plan Package (FTSPP) for the Big Creek Hydroelectric Projects (FERC Project Nos. 67, 120, 2085, and 2175). Terrestrial Resources - Chapter 13 - Mesocarnivores. Rosemead, CA.
Wildlife Conservation Board. 2002. Report to the Legislature on the Wildlife Protection Act of 1990. Annual Report - Fiscal Year 2002-2003. Sacramento: State of California.
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